Chapter 5 · Chapter 5

For three days my grandfather wrote nothing.

He sat in the yard with the ledger shut on his knee. The pomegranate let go its last fruit onto the tiles and nobody swept it, and when my brother Hasan asked whether the ink had gone hard in the horn, my grandfather said, "The ink is patient. It is the paper that has learned to run."

I did not ask what he meant. I had my own work: the drying rack, the jars, the mint that has to be cut before the sun takes its oil.

On the fourth day they brought the drum to the corner of the Zacatín.

Everyone in the Albaicín knows that sound before it means anything. A boy with a stick and a skin drum, and behind him a clerk in black carrying a parchment with a red seal hung off it by a ribbon. The clerk stepped up onto the rim of the fountain so his voice would carry over the water, and he read.

The Archbishop, he said, had set his hand to a writing concerning the books of the Moors.

I remember the words better than I remember the man, because my grandfather made me learn them that same night, and a thing learned by heart in childhood is kept in a different room than the rest.

Thirty days, the clerk read. Every book in the Arabic tongue, of law, of medicine, of grammar, of poetry, of the stars, of the sayings of the wise, to be carried to the house of the corregidor by the Darro, written into the list, and left there. Whoever held one back: his house would answer for it, and his goods, and his person.

Then he came to the reason, and read it in the same flat voice, as though it were the easiest of the clauses, that the books were to be looked into, so that whatever was found in them against the faith might be amended.

Amended. The word lay in the square like a coin that rings false, and nobody bent to pick it up.

A notary had already set his table by the fountain, with the list ruled and the ink wet, and by the time the clerk stepped down there was a man at the table with a sack between his feet, and then another. The silk merchant sent his boy with a handcart and eleven books, and stood in his doorway with his arms folded while the boy counted them out loud so that everyone would hear the number and no one would later say twelve.

By noon the pile in the plaza had a cloth thrown over it. The cloth was worse than the pile. A pile of books is a thing you can look at. A covered pile is a thing you are meant to walk past.

My grandfather went down to hear it himself, though he had heard every word from the doorway. He stood at the back, and men made room for him the way they do for a man whose name is older than their fathers' names. Then he walked to the step of the corregidor's house and stood there a while, and came home with his hands empty.

Maryama met him at the gate with her sleeves pushed up and flour on her wrist, and asked him what he had said.

"I asked to whom I should hand the book of my father's father, which is a book of medicine and not of the faith, and whether the man who wrote it is to be entered on the list beside his book."

"And what did they say?"

"They had no line for that question," my grandfather said. "So they made one, and wrote my name in it."

Maryama put her hand flat against the doorframe, and then took it away, and went back to the dough, because in that house the work was the only answer we had ever been given and we did not know another.

The man from Malaga came at dusk.

He brought a bundle of reed pens wrapped in a cloth, and set it down on the bench as though it were the thing he had come for, and stood with his hands at his sides.

"In Malaga," he said, "it went this way. First the list. Then the fire. Then they asked the men who had kept the books for the names of the men who had read them."

My grandfather looked at him for a long moment. "You were a child in Malaga."

"I was not," he said. "That is the whole of what I am telling you."

Hasan, who was younger than I and had been silent the whole day in the way that frightens a mother, said, "Will they burn ours?"

And the man from Malaga did the thing I did not expect of him, the same thing he had done over the chest. He crouched down so that his eyes were level with my brother's, and he did not soften his voice at all.

"They will burn what they can carry," he said. "So carry nothing."

That night my grandfather took the lamp into the inner room and shut the door, and then opened it again and called me in, which he had never done. The chest stood where it always stood. The seal on it was the seal of a dead man, my great-grandfather's, and no one had broken it in my lifetime.

He did not break it that night either.

He took out the herb book instead, the small one, and put it into my hands. "Read me the page with the rue."

I read it badly. He made me read it again, and then again, and on the third time he took the book out of my hands and closed it and set it on the chest.

"Now say it back to me."

I said it back, and stumbled at the place where the two kinds of rue are told apart, and he waited, and I found it, and went on.

"Again," he said. "In the morning, and at noon, and before the lamp. A page a day. If I am not here to hear it, say it to the wall."

"Why?"

"Because they have given us thirty days," my grandfather said, "and they have written my name on a list, and they believe they are counting books." He put his hand on the lid of the chest, flat, not on the seal, the way the man from Malaga had done it, steadying a table that someone had knocked.

"Paper is a thing a man can carry out of a house and put on a fire. That is all it has ever been. So we will keep the book in the one place they have not thought to look, and if they take the chest, and the chest after it, and the house after that, then it will still be there, saying what rue is, in a voice they cannot enter on a list."

I was a child. I did not understand the whole of what he was giving me, and I did not know then how far a page can travel in a person, or how many years a voice can hold before the last of it is spoken.

But I understood the arithmetic of it, which was all he asked of me. Thirty days. A page a day. And a square that had covered the books with a cloth, and would, in its own time, do the next thing after covering them.

So I learned to keep what a man cannot amend, and I learned it in that house, in the room behind the shut door, with the lamp between us and my hands smelling of the mint I had cut before the sun took its oil.